


bury a friend

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [59]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: 31 Days Of Halloween, Graphic Description of Corpses, M/M, Mild Gore, Resurrection, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-10 15:26:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20854007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: Steve digs up Billy’s body on a Tuesday.





	bury a friend

**Author's Note:**

> Day 1 of October. I'm attempting to do something resembling my Dark Month of old. Doubt I'll have the time to churn out something every day, but that's the plan. Since I don't really have any prompts in place, I took some from various October-related posts on tumblr and combined them to form the themes. Today was: roses/thorns, fear, burial, masks, poisons, and potions. This is kind of the exact opposite of a burial, but it's what my brain came up with.

Steve digs up Billy’s body on a Tuesday.

It’s early October, and the nights are just starting to go crisp around the edges, taking on that familiar chill that creeps through town like a bad omen. A ghost. The leaves are going early this year, and there’s already a generous bedding spread across the graveyard. They crunch under his feet as he walks,the oppressive silence wrapping around him, heavy as a cloak.

The graveyard is dark, the tombstones looming up out of the dirt, just waiting for someone to come along and trip over them. There’s no moon tonight, no stars thanks to the clouds hanging heavy and ominous in the sky above him. It’s the perfect night.

When he reaches Billy’s grave, he crouches there for a moment. He can’t read the gravestone, not in this light, but Billy’s name is there when he touches his fingers to the cool surface. He traces the B, then the H, the curling lowercase G.

There are roses curling around the stone, creamy red petals and black branches crowded with thorns. He doesn’t think anyone planted them. He thinks that they grew there, out of the dirt, fed on a steady diet of rain water and corpses. He remembers El here with Max, weeks ago, before they headed out, and wonders if it’s her doing.

The shovel he brought with him is the one they’ve had in their garage for well over a decade. It has a thick, sturdy wooden pole, a well-worn handle. The metal at its base is resilient, unbending. It’s shoveled through iced over snow for years, and he’s confident that it will do its job well.

He’s never done this before. It takes longer to get through six feet of dirt than he thought it would, and by the time the shovel thuds against the heavy wooden lid of Billy’s coffin, Steve is sweating.

The smell hits him before he even gets the lid open. He gags, shakes, spits off to the side as if he can get the taste of death and decay off his tongue.

Billy isn’t pretty in death. Formaldehyde may have slowed the rot, but there’s no stopping death. In three months, Billy has already started to liquify. The fatty flesh of his cheeks is all but gone, leaving tantalizing glimpses of the gleaming white skull beneath. His eyes are gone, leaving behind gaping hollows.

Steve doesn’t let himself look for long.

Raising the dead is easy. If all Steve wanted was a shambling corpse to do his bidding, all he’d need was a pint or two of his blood. But that isn’t what Steve wants. He wants Billy, alive and grinning, with his eyes and cheeks fully intact. And that is much more difficult.

When he was young, Steve accidentally brought his puppy back to life. The dog got off his leash and neither Steve or his mother were fast enough. The car left the animal crumpled and small, blood pooling around its cracked open skull.

Steve got to it first.

He touched the small body with his trembling, scabbed over knuckle - crying, wishing, and, more importantly, still bleeding from the cut he’d gotten moments before.

The dog got up off the cracked asphalt and tail wagging, licked him, smearing its own blood across Steve’s face.

It was the first and only time his parents let him have a pet.

Witches, his mother told him, shouldn’t make a habit of raising the dead.

The bag that he brought with him to the cemetery has much of what you’d expect a witches bag to hold. Herbs, spices, gleaming liquids in crystalline bottles. Several boxes of varying sizes with dubious staining along the base. A knife, long and sharp. But the most important ingredient is Steve himself.

“You better hope this works,” he says to Billy’s corpse, reaching for the knife.

He splits the skin open of his forearm, wrist to elbow, in one smooth stroke. He watches the blood well up, watches it bead along the cut for a moment, indecisive, before it begins to flow in earnest, dripping down his elbow before gravity takes hold and sends it down onto the corpse below him. The body makes a strange noise - a quiet, near imperceptible hiss. Smoke wisps off of it wherever the blood touches - eye sockets, cheeks, forehead, the hollow of the throat where Steve can almost make out what used to be Billy’s voice box.

Steve closes his eyes.

The place between the living and the dead is very thin, a fleshy membrane hiding inside just the right shadow. The kids call it the Upside Down. He hasn’t told them yet exactly what it is. Witches, he’s told, shouldn’t make a habit of telling people that they’re witches either.

There’s a door behind every shadow, he thinks, and the night is very, very dark.

The other world is cold and strange. He’s never liked it. Fortunately, Billy’s soul isn’t too far, sitting at his graveside and glaring at Steve. His eyes are blue and haunted, his skin pale and damp.

“Took you long enough,” he says.

Steve cocks his head, squinting into the blackness behind Billy. If he tries, he can start to make out shapes. Monsters or other souls, he doesn’t know.

“I had to find the right ingredients,” he tells him with a shrug. “Are you coming or are you planning on complaining some more?”

Steve holds a hand out to him. His blood drips freely in the space between them, his entire arm red and wet, glistening in the strange meager light of this place. Billy curls a lip at it, but shoves himself up anyway.

He drifts closer, until he’s got one foot in his own grave.

“And you’re sure this will work?”

He sounds almost nervous.

Steve shrugs. “Can’t be sure of anything, but it’s gotta be better than this.”

Distantly, something howls, and Billy shudders, clenching his eyes shut. Steve watches him swallow.

“Yeah,” Billy says, and reaches for Steve’s hand. “Okay.”

When Steve opens his eyes in the real world, he’s gone light-headed. Billy’s corpse is saturated in his blood, but it’s not enough, so Steve reaches down and smears it down the body, carefully breathing through his mouth. He reaches for his bag. There’s a bottle in its depths that holds a brackish liquid pre-mixed with his own blood and several other unsavory components. Carefully, he prods Billy’s jaw open, and tips the mixture inside.

“All right, sweetheart,” he says. “Be good for me now.”

He lays a bloody hand on Billy’s chest and _pushes_.

It isn’t a science. Witchcraft is an art, and as is the case with most works of art, there is some waiting required, along with a hell of a lot of belief.

It takes three and a half hours before Billy’s ready to open his eyes. By then, Steve has carefully applied the remaining ingredients in his bag to the body, and bandaged up his arm.

When Billy gasps back to life under him, Steve is smoking a cigarette. Wordlessly, he passes it down into the grave. Billy’s fingers reach for it, no longer skeletal, but thick and fleshy. Steve watches him take a deep drag, and arches an eyebrow.

“You still smell,” he tells Billy.

Billy looks at him, blue eyes smoldering.

“Maybe that’s because someone kept me dead for three months,” he hisses, and sits up. The coffin creaks under him. There’s a squelching noise as Steve’s blood and the remnants of Billy’s slowly liquifying body tries its damndest to keep Billy right where he is.

Billy makes a face. “Gross.”

“Mm,” Steve hums in agreement.

He doesn’t help Billy to his feet, mostly because he’s lost a lot of blood and isn’t entirely sure if he can actually stand right now, but he does watch him. It’s almost funny, Billy Hargrove, dripping in blood and grave juices, legs as shaky as a newborn gazelle.

When he’s finally standing, Billy tips his head up to the sky and stares at it for a long minute, just breathing. When he speaks, his voice is a thready whisper. “Thought this kind of shit would have required a full moon.”

“New moons are better,” Steve tells him. “New beginnings and all that.”

Billy tears his eyes away from the dark sky and looks at him. His eyes are so, so alive.

“So what did you sacrifice?”

Steve shows his teeth. It’s not really a smile. More of a grimace. “My secret, not yours.”

Billy narrows his eyes.“I’ll find out eventually.”

“Maybe.” Steve shrugs. “Maybe not. Now finish that cigarette and get undressed.”

Billy snorts and gives him a look that means he can probably see right through all of Steve’s bullshit. But he’s good. He gets undressed, peeling off layer after disgusting layer until he stands naked amongst the tombstones, his face and chest still smeared red.

He gives Steve a sharp smile.

“Is this the part where we bone down and praise Satan?” he asks.

“Tempting as that is,” Steve tells him, eyes greedily taking in all the new skin. “I would much rather get you back to a bath.”

Billy’s smile goes a little wider. He steps into the space between Steve’s legs and presses close. He reeks of death and blood and grave dirt, but he’s warm, and for a moment, Steve is terribly tempted.

He licks his lips.

“And then?”

Steve sighs. “And then we can bone down and praise Satan.”

**Author's Note:**

> My [tumblr](https://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/), if you dare.


End file.
